


Pretty Girls Made Monsters

by nonky



Category: Nancy Drew (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21854869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonky/pseuds/nonky
Summary: The town didn't want to see them after they were tainted with tragedy. Like Lucy's family, it would skirt around their wounded forms until they had the decency to go elsewhere and blend in anonymously. It would blame them for what had happened to them, or at least imply there was some moral lapse to it. When people pictured Lucy, they made her the eye-gouged, muted wraith Nancy had seen. Tiffany had nearly killed George trying to make sense of her death. Karen had just turned on a man she was supposed to care about, rending his family apart for the second time in half a year.Spoilers up to Episode 9.
Relationships: Carson Drew & Nancy Drew, Nancy Drew/Ned Nickerson, Nancy Drew/Owen Marvin
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14
Collections: Nancy Drew TV Series (2019)





	Pretty Girls Made Monsters

Nancy's sour wish for her father to regret dating Karen had come true. She was left shattered beside her front door, with McGinnis frowning sympathetically at her. Karen made eye contact for one burning second, and then turned around and walked to her car. 

"You should call one of your friends to come over," he told her. "You don't want to be alone. Nancy, I know this is a moment of extreme stress. You're going to want to do something, and whatever you think of you absolutely should not do. Wait until morning, get some sleep, and talk to somebody. Nothing you come up with in this moment is going to be a good thing. Call a lawyer, and hire them, but do not handle this yourself."

She knew he was right. She was panicking, holding it in. There was no comparison to losing her mother and seeing her father arrested, except it felt like falling. There was no merciful stopping point. She would keep falling, had been falling for six months with no end in sight. Seeing Nathan Gomber again had left her shaken, and Simon was a terrifying new reality to process. Her recently regained memories were unwelcome shadows flickering around the edges of her mind.

There had been a real moment of power and joy when she'd destroyed Simon's shrine, faced down Nathan Gomber and settled an old trauma with her father's help. It was a turning point, a satisfaction of emotional strain she hadn't known she was carrying so heavily. 

She'd been looking forward to maybe having a decent working relationship with McGinnis, but he felt like the enemy again. She nodded and mumbled something politer than he deserved about calling somebody just to get him out the door. 

The boomerang of so many highs and lows was draining. She'd seen death take Tiffany Hudson and hover around Ace's hospital bed. She'd felt ghosts shriek for the justice denied over decades, and couldn't seem to stop herself from running directly to her enemies to accuse them of their guilty secrets. Ordinary things did not matter next to the stakes of the answers she had to piece together into some sort of actionable justice. 

There were ghosts and demons, along with the human villains and enemies. It was hard not to be paranoid. Nancy had always noticed a lot of things she knew other people seemed to ignore. She wondered how much of it was real, and how much was her mind creating fearful things to express bad feelings about people getting away with crimes without any supernatural element.

Nick had been right. She hadn't wanted her father to be guilty and be punished. She had wanted him to be puzzled, offended and angry but glaringly innocent of her suspicions. Once she'd known he was in the grey area of it, she should have destroyed everything that linked him to Lucy Sable. 

Horseshoe Bay was so small. It wanted to be a happy, friendly harbour of quaint small businesses and fond traditions. Nancy had to bury her mother and tanked her college applications with poor grades. Her family was a happy story turned rotten. She was a reminder healthy, successful, pretty high school girls turned into flawed, failing young women. 

Lucy Sable had died on the one day they couldn't avoid noticing her absence, and they'd made her into a rhyme to print on souvenir mugs and t-shirts. Karen Hart had left town a normal graduate, and returned a police officer. She'd wanted to provide long-avoided justice, and no one was interested in difficult truths. Tiffany Hudson was supposed to be living a charmed life, and instead she'd been murdered in a parking lot begging for mercy. 

The town didn't want to see them after they were tainted with tragedy. Like Lucy's family, it would skirt around their wounded forms until they had the decency to go elsewhere and blend in anonymously. It would blame them for what had happened to them, or at least imply there was some moral lapse to it. When people pictured Lucy, they made her the eye-gouged, muted wraith Nancy had seen. Tiffany had nearly killed George trying to make sense of her death. Karen had just turned on a man she was supposed to care about, rending his family apart for the second time in half a year. 

Nancy had made a list of evidence to cast doubt on her father, setting him up to be framed for a murder he didn't understand himself. She felt like she was steps away from becoming one of the monsterous female legends of Horseshoe Bay. Her mind taunted her with a little verse, a taste of her ugly future reputation. 

'Nancy Drew pointed a finger,  
Turned North, South, East and West,  
Let her accusation linger,  
And called for her father's arrest.  
Haunted Nancy met Dead Lucy wailing on the stair,  
And sent her father screaming to the electric chair.'

She knew Maine didn't have capital punishment, and the Hudsons would probably try to help him in order to keep their own family members safe from prosecution. She knew there was a long court battle before Carson Drew was lost completely. She felt like she'd lost him just asking him if he'd killed Lucy. She knew her father, and he wasn't a murderer. She didn't know why she'd needed to hear him say it to know she believed it. 

The more the moment stretched long with hopeless misery, she wanted to shout at Lucy to show herself. She wanted to treat the dead girl like a monster, too, because her demand for justice had brought ruin in its wake. McGinnis had said the house had a supernatural position, powering Lucy to be a little more able to act on the mortal plane from where she was trapped. 

"Lucy," she called unsteadily. "I know you can't tell the police yourself, but you need to show me something that can lead to your real killer. My father was wrong to cover it up, but he wasn't the one."

She stood for a long while, breathing shallow as she waited for the feeling of something other in the room. It never came. When she wanted to be haunted, was ready to face it, nothing was ever willing to contact her directly. 

Nancy wanted to light candles and call the dead girl out, shout at her for not being able to give answers that exposed the people truly responsible for her murder. She wanted to risk another seance just to be able to vent the rage of knowing she'd helped hurt her father right at the moment they were able to get back to some form of trust. She didn't care if she filled the whole of the state with demons like Simon. Maybe she should be trying to make her own deal with something like that, using the never alive to get her out of her entanglements with the dead.

She had no one living who hadn't had the same rough day. Her high school friends had moved on, happy to be looking forward to better things. They felt bad for her troubles, but they wouldn't want to be part of her life in the mess it was. George had nearly lost her sister and been possessed. Bess was in a complicated, dangerous relationship and her questions about her family were still unanswered. Nick needed to find justice for Tiffany, and rebuild his life without the potential for legal trouble. He had broken up with her, and Nancy thought he was right. She had accused Ace of betraying their little group of almost friends, and he'd nearly died to fix the mistake. 

Her snap deductions about who people were, and what they were capable of doing were feeling less like real detective work and more like grudges based on her own issues. Nancy had ended up alone, and her father had seen it coming for her.

Her father was in the back of a police car, going to be booked and charged. He would be interrogated, put into a cell for the night, and then taken out to be interrogated more. She could follow and shout all she wanted, but no one would listen to her now. It spoke louder than her voice that she would write notes doubting him. All the cops who thought she was a snoop and disregarded her real evidence would suddenly be willing to trust her work. She'd been right about Rawley, and they'd arrested him on her evidence. 

Nancy had finally cracked how to get a little respect from the local police, and it was just in time for her to accuse her own father of murder. Her theft of evidence from the local morgue would just be another aspect of making a case against him. Carson had made that evidence disappear to protect her, and she had nothing to show for that second, unidentified female who was with Lucy when she died. 

She picked up her purse and her phone, sitting on the stairs and scrolling blindly as she cried. There had to be someone who could arrive in town and get Carson Drew out of jail. The police could hold him a day without charges. After that, they needed a confession or to make their case to a judge for a bail hearing. Nancy's own notes said the Drews had gone to Europe for a year after Lucy's death to distance themselves from it. Bail would be high. 

She had Ryan Hudson's number, but she knew he was short on cash. Calling him was the same as calling Celeste Hudson. He wasn't an ally. It could backfire and make both her guilt and her father's obvious if they'd kept some evidence of their own to offer. 

Nancy eventually pulled herself together and stood up. She sat at her father's desk and looked through his collection of business cards until she found a lawyer she knew was one of his friends practicing in Boston. They needed a lawyer, and no one local would be comfortable facing down the Hudsons. If they decided they wanted, they would paint Carson as an overzealous new lawyer whose ambitions had led to him misinterpreting their concerns for Ryan's date to a call for her head.

She left a shaky voicemail, and absently put her phone into her purse. Nancy had slung it over her head, as if she knew where she could go. She knew staying at home felt dangerous. She had a lot of files around her on the desk, and the police had forced the locks on the closed cabinets. Carson's laptop was gone, but she could get into his cloud storage. She ached to dig until something showed he wasn't a killer, but she wasn't in good shape to recognize anything helpful. 

A plastic bag crinkled, and she pulled out the jellybeans left over from her movie with Owen. She put it on the desk and blinked as she realized she had seen him just that day. He'd been happy to see her, not that he knew her well enough to know the stupid destruction she was capable of doing by accident. He'd shrugged off her lame excuse about her bruised eye, and focused on giving her the help he could. He treated her like a pretty girl, but also with respect she craved when she knew her logic was sound. His sense of morality and intentions seemed to match her own.

He was kind, and he'd offered her shelter when she needed to duck out of her own life. Nick was still around, but Nancy didn't owe him fidelity. She just wanted a safe place to land for a few hours, and another person around to remind her why she shouldn't give in to all her reckless ideas. 

He knew her well enough to like her, but not so well he knew her faults and her tells. Nancy packed an overnight bag and left her house with a slam of the door.


End file.
